Australian startup knocks back $1 million

Troy Westley knocks back $1 million investment offer from his Melbourne based startup "CareMonkey" after  winning the Slush international startup pitch challenge after taking out the local competition in Melbourne.

The event was a great opportunity to network and meet potential partners and winning it was great publicity for us.” 

CareMonkey provides a system of managing sensitive personal and medical information stored by schools, clubs and groups with a duty of care, expanding from a team of eight in November to 17.

The company saw more revenue in November and December last year than all of the previous financial year and is “quite profitable”, Westley says.

“The business is growing fast – we’re earning good revenue,” he says. “We’ve turned into a profitable organisation.”

Because of this Westley says he isn’t interested in any outside investments at the moment – even a $1 million one.

“We did take it seriously and had a look at taking the investment but my co-founder and I decided that our focus is on generating revenue and proving we can be a profitable company,” he says. (Taking a leaf out of Mike and Scott's unicorn, Atlassian! )

We would rather focus on building the business than spending energy raising capital.

The Secret Formula 

Providing a great product, having happy customers and earning revenue.

We are spending our energy focussing on our  customers, giving them massive value so that they would be delighted to pay to use our service.

“From the very first customer we had revenue – I think that’s a good way to build a sustainable business.”

International Aspirations 

Westley says a move into the US and UK is already in the works, and we’ll do the same there as we’ve done here,” he says.

“We’ll get a foothold, get happy customers, earn revenue and understand what we need to do to be a dominant player in those markets."

“After that it’d be a good time to go to investors.”